PayLeafThe terminal dies at 1pm
Peak lunch rush, and the reader is at 4% because it never made it onto the charger. Meanwhile a queue of eight people is working out whether they have cash.
Food truck payments
One sticker at the window. No terminal on the counter.
A QR code taped by the service window is the whole setup. Customers scan it, pay on their own phone, and you keep your hands on the food — no terminal to charge overnight, no card reader passed back and forth through a hatch, no monthly rental on a machine that sits idle all winter.
No hardware$0 per monthWorks at any event
Sound familiar?
Service windows and card terminals do not get along.
Festival wifi does not exist
Event grounds are the worst possible place for a device that needs its own stable connection. Your customers' phones are already on their own data plans — let them use them.
Paying rent through a slow season
A terminal contract charges the same in February as it does at a summer festival. Trade twenty weekends a year and you are paying twelve months for twenty days of use.
How PayLeaf fits a truck
The customer's phone is the card reader.
Your PayLeaf QR code is printed once and stuck where people already look — beside the menu board, on the window frame, on a tent card at the pickup end of the counter. A customer points their camera at it, a secure Stripe-powered payment page opens in their browser, and they pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Nothing to install on their side, nothing to hand back and forth on yours.
Because the payment happens on the customer's phone over their own connection, event wifi stops being your problem. You need enough signal to see the payment land — and if you are already serving the next order while it clears, the app has the whole day's takings waiting whenever you get a moment to look.
Every payment appears in your dashboard immediately with a timestamp, so cashing out at the end of a market day means reading a total instead of counting a float and guessing at what the tin should hold. Refunds go out from your phone if an order goes wrong.
There is no monthly fee, so the truck costs nothing to keep payment-ready through the off-season. You pay 3.4% + 30¢ all in, only on the sales you actually make — the pricing page has the exact dollars on a typical ticket.
A window sale taken without a terminal, settled before the order was handed over.
FAQ
Straight answers.
No. You need a phone to run the app and a printed QR code at the window. There is no reader to buy, rent, charge or replace, and nothing to plug in.
The customer pays through their own phone's data connection, so your setup does not depend on venue wifi. You need enough signal on your own phone to see payments arrive and to send refunds, which is usually the case anywhere a crowd has service.
For most trucks it is faster than passing a terminal through a window, because the customer starts paying while you are still plating. Several customers can scan the same code at the same time, so nobody is waiting for a single device to free up.
The customer pays the amount you set on a secure Stripe-hosted page. If you want a tip included, add it to the order before you generate the amount, or keep a jar for cash — PayLeaf does not add a tipping prompt of its own.
Yes. Your QR code is not tied to a location, so the same sticker works at any event you trade at in Canada. Payouts land in the same Canadian bank account no matter where the sale happened.
More questions? The full FAQ covers fees, payouts, refunds and GST in detail.